There's been plenty of
hand-wringing over the supposed loss of labor unity in the wake of the AFL-CIO
split. While AFL-CIO headquarters will take in a few million dollars less in
dues--a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the labor movement spends
each year--it's not clear what else will be that different in
relations between the two union blocs.

Will there be more
fights between unions to organize the same workers? Possibly, although
AFL-CIO unions have been fighting each other state-by-state for decades to
represent the same public sector workers, multiple unions have fought to
represent the same workers at hospitals across the country, and the
Communication Workers of America and UNITE-HERE have been in an ongoing fight
to represent casino workers in California, to name just a few of the ongoing
jurisdictional battles. So it's not clear how much more competition is
likely to happen beyond what we've already seen.

Will political unity be
lost? In the 2004 election, unions were bitterly divided in the primaries
between different Democratic candidates and, while they almost all supported
John Kerry, different unions spent much of their electoral money through their
own political vehicles: SEIU supported the group America Coming Together,
AFSCME promoted an alternative "527 committee" called Voices for Working
Families, and all unions operated substantially through single-union political
committees. So electoral cooperation has always been more on a case-by-case
basis than through any permanent institutional unity of political
operations.

Will unity at the local
level be lost? John Sweeney swore at the AFL-CIO convention that unions
disaffiliating at the national level would be barred from participation in
local and state labor councils. But within weeks of the split, he was
backpedaling under pressure from AFL-CIO locals and offered disaffiliated
unions the option of participating in those local bodies under so-called
solidarity charters. While the particular deal was not seen as that attractive
to the disaffiliated unions, it reflects a shared desire to find ways to work
together one way or another. If working through official local labor bodies
doesn't pan out, there are already a number of labor-backed local
non-profit groups--such as Working Partnerships in Silicon Valley and the
national Jobs with Justice network--that will likely become vehicles for
formal cooperation between unions in and out of the AFL-CIO.

So if fears about lost
unity are overblown, what are the potential gains from the split? At some
level, I subscribe to the idea that almost anything that stirs up new energy in
the labor movement is good. The split has forced labor leaders on all sides to
engage in more strategic thinking than we've seen in decades, so
that's a gain all by itself.

And if the new Change to
Win unions actually begin cooperating in fundamentally new ways, the results
for workers in those industries could be profound. There was a taste of that
promise in the immediate wake of the AFL-CIO convention when all of the Change
to Win unions pledged to back Houston and Indianapolis janitors who had
organized innovative sympathy strikes among other janitors in cities around the
country in earlier weeks. Brian Rainville of Teamsters Joint Council 25 in
Chicago announced that if the janitors reestablished picket lines in Chicago,
the council would sanction those strike lines for its more than 100,000
members. This was a major escalation of the threat janitorial companies faced
if they resisted the demands of janitors in Houston.

The results of both the
janitors' solidarity and the support of the other unions were dramatic.
Within weeks of this solidarity statement by the Change to Win unions, five
janitorial contractors in Houston agreed to recognize the union if a majority
of workers signed cards requesting it, and agreed not to campaign against the
union or otherwise discourage workers from joining. This means that 6,000
building service workers in Tom Delay's back yard will likely have a union
within a few months, highlighting the possibility of organizing workers even in
the South when unions practice real solidarity.

I would wager that the
unions left in the AFL-CIO will react to the split by tightening their
organizing focus and solidarity in similar ways. It's worth remembering
that in the wake of the old CIO split in the 1930s, it was the AFL that, in
response, ended up organizing more workers in the following years.

Two blocs of more tightly
unified unions are likely to be more successful in coming organizing drives
than the more diffuse solidarity that existed before the split. There will no
doubt be bumps in the road ahead, but I predict that organizing will be the
winner in the end.

Nathan Newman, a
long-time labor activist and lawyer, is director of Agenda for Justice, a
nonprofit that supports state and local campaigns for economic and social
justice.